The Trade Desk ties with Gojek to link online ads with offline sales

The Trade Desk has struck an exclusive partnership with Southeast Asian superapp Gojek to provide advertisers with insight into how their online campaigns convert to offline sales.

Here's how it works: The Trade Desk will correlate Gojek’s in-store and online purchase data—that is purchases made within the Gojek app, such as for its food delivery service GoFood as well as in-store transactions with merchants who accept its mobile wallet GoPay—with campaigns run through its platform, to map how a campaign leads to a purchase, including where prospects drop out of the funnel.

The partnership will initially focus on Indonesia, but it is expected to roll out across other Southeast Asia markets this year.

The demand-side platform claims the partnership will create the first online-to-offline (O2O) measurement solution in Southeast Asia. There are a few examples of Google doing something similar with the likes of Sephora in Singapore, but that relied on pooling data from Sephora's loyalty programme, which some advertisers may not have at their disposal.

“Analysing offline attribution has been an aspiration for marketers everywhere," commented Mitch Waters, The Trade Desk's SVP of Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. "Given Gojek’s footprint and innovation mindset, we can now make that goal a reality."

Indeed, measuring how digital advertising converts into sales has always been a key challenge for the industry—especially in Asia, where marketers tend to focus too much on 'vanity metrics' like cost-per-clicks (CPCs) which are rather useless at measuring business outcomes. Advertisers can track conversions using first-party cookies from the likes of Google and Facebook (many of which used to be third-party cookies but were quickly switched ahead of the imminent third-party war, although that's another can of worms), but as we know, cookies may not be the most stable form of tracking conversions in the future.

The Trade Desk flaunted the fact this partnership uses "actual in-store purchase transactions instead of cookie-based data" in a release announcing the news.

Gojek’s VP for merchant research and analytics, Pulkit Khanna, said: "Our mission is to remove life's daily friction by connecting consumers to the best providers of goods and services in the market. This partnership will enable advertisers on The Trade Desk platform to use Gojek’s insight to measure their campaigns and ultimately increase the effectiveness of their advertising.”